After the rehabilitation of Terence Rattigan and JB Priestley, it now seems the turn of Somerset Maugham. But, while Matthew Dunster's English Touring Theatre revival of this 1929 West End hit is first-rate, I can't help feeling that Maugham's commercial instinct short-circuits any genuine moral debate.

The starting point is that Maurice, a war hero paralysed from the waist down after a plane crash, is married to the young, vivacious Stella; when Maurice is suddenly found dead in his bed, several possibilities arise. Was his demise due to natural causes, suicide or, as his devoted nurse suggests, plain, old-fashioned murder? Maugham certainly keeps the audience on tenterhooks and raises big questions about love's transience, the power of female sexuality and the patient's right to die. But he's so keen to ratchet up the suspense that he allows little room for real argument. It's one thing for Dunster to invoke Ibsen, as he does in the programme, but in Ibsen the artfully delayed solution to the mystery would have been the play's starting point.

It is difficult, however, to imagine the play being better done. Dunster keeps Maurice, stoically played by Jamie De Courcey, visible throughout the action, underscores Maugham's self-consciously poetic passages through discreet use of sound and light and encourages the actors to hit just the right period note. I was especially impressed with Robert Demeger's quiet underplaying of an ex-officer in the Indian police who had once known the pangs of love. But the burden of the evening is effortlessly carried by Beatriz Romilly as Maurice's distraught wife, Margot Leicester as his humane mother and Sarah Churm as the accusatory nurse. Whatever Maugham's flaws, he certainly knew how to write for women.

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